Red Cross celebrates 100 years of service in Australia

By World War the II Red Cross was Australia’s largest charitable organisation. From a population of 7 million, nearly half a million people, mostly women, volunteered.

Supplied: Red Cross Australia

The Red Cross, one of Australia's longest running volunteer organisations, is celebrating its centenary.

It was established a week after the outbreak of the Great War in August 1914.

A century later, it is a billion dollar organisation, with services stretching from the Blood Bank Service to humanitarian and disaster relief programs.

History studies professor Melanie Opphenheimer says the changes in the Red Cross show changes in Australian life across the last 100 years.

"If you want to look at the history of the 20th century Australia, you can actually look at the history of the Red Cross," she said.

It represented something they could do to help the war effort.

Melanie Opphenheimer

The Australian branch of the British Red Cross Society was founded in 1914 by the wife of then governor-general Lady Helen Munro Ferguson.

She came to Australia with a detailed understanding of the Scottish branch and within 10 days of war, she encouraged all the governors' wives to set up a Red Cross division in their state.

Australian women flocked to the Red Cross.

"Within a couple of months you’ve got hundred of thousands of women all around the country forming branches in every little tiny community. It represented something they could do to help the war effort," Professor Oppenheimer said.

Volunteers old and new value their service

One of best known and loved volunteers was Vera Deakin, who later became Lady Vera White.

She was the daughter of Australia's second prime minister Alfred Deakin.

She travelled to Egypt in 1915 and later to London to run the Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau.

It was a lifeline for bereft families, who had not been given any information about their missing boys.

Her daughter Judith Harley says the Red Cross was responsible for her parents' marriage.

"One of the letters in the archives was one my mother wrote to an Australian prisoner of war of the Turks, a pilot called Captain White," she said.

"She wrote to him about news of other men in the camp, which was pretty appalling.

"He later escaped from the prisoner of war camp and came to London where he was introduced to my mother. Three weeks later they were engaged."

Lady Vera continued volunteering until she died in 1978.

One of the new crop of volunteers is Nathan Taylor, a 25-year-old indigenous university student, who gives driving lessons to young mothers in state care in Sydney.

"I care about helping people in low socioeconomic backgrounds. Myself, not coming from a very well off family, it's important for me to provide the assistance I wish I had when I was growing up," he said.

"To say that I'm not getting paid for what I’m doing here doesn't devalue it in any way.

"For me, the value is in the improvement. The development of someone is the value itself."

Looking to the next century of the Australian Red Cross

Robert Tickner is the chief executive of the Australian Red Cross.

He says the organisation has been on a journey of reform over the past decade which has laid the groundwork for another 100 years.